A collection of writings and musings from the Sententia Gamification Team, a global collective of gamification professionals. We are the ONLY organization to offer three levels of Gamification Certification for Human Resource and Talent Development professionals that can be recognized by HRCI, SHRM, and ATD for recertification credits. Learn more at www.SententiaGames.com

Monday, August 31, 2015

In this episode of Gamification Talk Radio, the question you’ll hear Bart ask you is, “Do you and your team really believe in your project?” By "Pactifying" it you can grow "Pact Value" together by executing actions and achieving milestones on time! Wouldn’t that be an AWESOME news to report upstream.

In this week's interview we explored the core philosophy of Pactify, which is to gamify the actual business process – not “gamified learning” but “gamified doing”.

And for the ever important ROI – Bart will share with us why gamification can help boost results in performance improvement programs.

About Bart Vanderhaegen:Bart Vanderhaegen is an Engineer in physics with an MBA. Bart spent most of career in management consulting with The Boston Consulting Group and mainly focused on managing large performance improvement programs.

He is known as a leader in the execution of large programs as well as a developer of new methodologies to support program management. Bart focuses on combining (i) rigorous program methodology, (ii) web based technology and (iii) gamification to enable more engaged execution. Connect with Bart at www.pactifysoftware.com

About Your Host:A gamification keynote speaker and curriculum designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica’s niche is non-technical gamification used in the corporate environment. Connect with Monica (@monicacornetti) www.monicacornetti.com

Gamification is definitely the BUZZ word of 2015. If you're in the Talent Development, HR, and Employee Engagement fields, haven't you heard that gamification is in high demand and will continue to be for at least the next 7-10 years? And isn't it true, if you do a quick job search on any job site for trainers, instructional designers, eLearning developers... you'll see that gamification is on the list of preferred, if not REQUIRED, skill sets?

Sunday, August 30, 2015

To become a player, one must voluntarily accept the rules and constraints of the game. This acceptance of the game’s rules is part of what Bernard Suits calls the lusory attitude. (Lusory derives from the Latin word for game.)The lusory attitude of the players is defined as the “State of affairs where in one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end.”For example, in the game of golf: The objective is to get the ball in the cup on each hole with the least amount of swings of the club. Whoever has the least amounts of swings wins the round. Putting it in the hole with your hand would be best way to do that. You would not choose to take a stick with a piece of metal on one end of it, walk 300 or 400 yards away from the hole, and then attempt to drive the ball into the hole with the stick.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Gamification invites people to participate and engage by integrating game mechanics and game dynamics into non-game contexts. My favorite space to use gamification is in the area of Talent Development.

By adding game mechanics to training, Gamification not only increases interest, it makes training FUN!

The goal is to increase learning and engagement through key concepts found in game design and behavioral psychology. When participants first encounter the game, they rely upon a combination of visual cues, called game elements, to not only understand how the game is played, but also how success is defined and determined.The most common include:

Sunday, August 23, 2015

In a survey from Gallup Inc. with employees, only around 15% say that they feel a high emotional connection with their employer. AND 24% even admit that they don’t have any commitment for their workplace and company.But what drives people? Each employee in each organization in each country has different motives. You can be driven by money, status, burning ambition, power, lifestyle, sociological character and much, much more.On this episode of the Gamification Talk Radio program Roman and Monica discuss how you can discover your individual way of using game-like behavior to unfold the powerful engagement of your employees – to truly motivate them.

About Roman Rackwitz: As the founder of Engaginglab he leads the first established Gamification Agency within the German speaking countries. He is rated as a Top 10 Gamification Guru of world wide Gamification Experts by Leaderboarded. Roman is the Chair at GamifyCon, a German Gamification Conference and co-founded GamFed, the world’s first Gamification Association. An associate professor at different educational institutions since 2012, in 2014 he created the first official lecture at Munich Business School where he teaches about ‘Gamification for HR & Marketing.’ www.engaginglab.com

Friday, August 21, 2015

While points, badges, and leaderboards are important elements of gamification projects, gamification is more than just drizzling these elements onto a business process like hot fudge on Blue Bell Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. Gamification requires a great deal of thought about the entire design of the system, including understanding the nature of your users, thinking about what you’d like them to do and how best to make them do it.As with any type of program design it needs to be carefully considered, designed, and reviewed. If you’re going to gamify your training and development then you’ll need to have knowledge of psychology, motivation, and game design, and understand the potential pitfalls of each.Here are four areas to consider:

Monday, August 17, 2015

Studies show that learners comprehend and retain more through stories. And storytelling, when used in training design, allows us to connect to the learner on an emotional level and helps to create interest in the learning topic.

Since training should be more than just about delivering facts. When developing high-quality, effective gamified training programs, we should weave stories into the instructional design and delivery – framing the quest (or learning adventure) in a spellbinding story.For example, I was hired to gamify a 6-hour Payroll Law class. I was told, “Do your thing… make it fun and interactive. We want them to hire us, so they should understand how complex payroll law really is, and at the same time they should walk away from the day with a basic knowledge of the many components of the law.”

Sunday, August 16, 2015

My adventure into the world of Gamification formally began in the summer of 2012 when I received a call from a client asking me to develop a Gamification Workshop to teach problem solving skills for managers. I was honored to be asked and thanked her for thinking of me.I assured her that I was the ideal person to hire for this design and delivery … after all, since 2003 I had earned the reputation of using games to interact and motivate participants in all my leadership, strategic thinking and communication workshops.However, as I asked her about her objectives and outcomes ... I was quickly Googling the word “gamification.”Truth was, at the time, I didn’t have a clue what gamification was. I had heard the term bantered around … but as of yet it wasn’t anything I had turned my focus to. A lot has happened since then.

What I read started to change my entire way of thinking about the Gamer Generation and games in the workplace.

I then sat fascinated while watching a TED talk given by Californian game designer, Jane McGonigal. She says that by the time they turn 21, a dedicated gamer will spend 10,000 hours playing video games – exactly the same amount of time they will have spent in formal education.

According to McGonigal, four miraculous things happen to gamers while playing during those 10,000 hours.

First, they become urgently optimistic, overwhelmed by a desire to win

Second, they bond closely, as those who play together are more inclined to like and trust each other

Third, it makes them happy over-achievers, sitting at their screens for hours in a state of focused bliss

And finally it furnishes them with some sort of epic purpose – a larger-than-life reason for being

What interests me about these four stats is that they are precisely the things that make up a model employee – an optimistic, idealistic team worker who is blissfully happy to create, innovate, and work away all day and all night.

Indeed, if only some way could be found to make the working world a bit more like World of Warcraft, then not only would offices vanish, so would all problems of morale, lack of engagement and slackers.But before I got too carried away with this high-tech nirvana, a couple of other things occurred to me. From observing the excessive gaming that went on in our recreation room, as my now 20-something sons grew up playing endless hours of games with their friends, I also remembered that video games make people lazy, grumpy, and addicted to instant gratification.They also make you terribly inefficient: You feel productive … while achieving nothing. They make you think you can do things you can’t, like be a global ruler or score goals like Tom Brady when you're actually not in shape enough to even run round the block.But then … don’t we see those same traits from some of the Boomers in our working world -- inefficiency, laziness and overconfidence?Maybe the new version of the workplace run by the Gamer Generation won’t be all that different after all. It will be good and bad. Just as it is now.

Forward thinking organizations everywhere are beginning to understand the power of gamification to increase engagement as well as the bottom line and are quickly learning how to leverage its power. Let’s enter the world of Gamification together.

Friday, August 14, 2015

"Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun." - Mikhail Baryshnikov

Haven’t you found that the really great things in life take a lot of hard work? To understand the complicated beautiful things in science, economics, and even music -- you have to get past the incredibly dull and mind-numbing fundamentals. The same is true in gamification design. Making business processes more compelling by making them FUN is what I do – and that FUN always starts with four questions:1. Why are you gamifying this project? When looking to gamify any aspect of your business we must first ask if gamification is a good idea and what exactly do you want to achieve from gamifying this process or this project.2. What are your objectives? For example you may have objectives to:

Change a current business process

Train your salespeople to handle typical objections from customers

Eliminate knowledge silos

On-boarding new employees

Upgrade technology in your organization and you want to get employees up to speed on these new processes as quickly as possible

Turn dry and boring lecture type internal training and development into something that is interactive high paced hands on engaging and motivating for your employees

Repeatedly in gamification design, we have found that your objectives need to meet certain criteria if they are to be useful:

3. What are your target behaviors? Once you’ve defined your goals, you need to figure out what specific actions will be required to realize it. What do you want your employees to do that they are not doing now? What new behavior patterns would they need to adopt in order to sustain your business model? Think in verbs, not nouns. What do you need people to do? You should rank these actions from most critical to least critical and also score them from most likely to happen to least likely to happen because that will help you to focus your game mechanics. 4. How will gamification help you achieve your objectives? Because you have identified the key actions or behaviors you want to see from your users, you can now begin to match your mechanics and motivators so that you can find a way to encourage that particular set of behaviors. If you really aren’t sure, start with just one action. It’s not a bad idea to take baby steps as you see how your users respond and whether or not you’re providing the right experience to promote the key behaviors. That way you can improve on your results with one or just a few user engagement goals instead of trying to implement a huge game layer with tons of complexity.You may want to skip over the fundamentals of design for a variety of reasons… impatience, deadlines, or perhaps a hubris that tempts you to think, “It’s gamification, how hard can this be?” But start with the fundamentals so that you build your gamification strategy on a solid foundation.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Gamification is the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts. Let me break that down.Game Elements: Think of game elements as a toolkit for building a game. Game elements include game pieces, avatars, rules, scoring points, proceeding to the next level, receiving badges, or unlocking a reward. As you begin to gamify a system, you can and should modify the elements to target certain business objectives and to make the experience more engaging.Game Techniques: The aspects of games that make them fun, addicting, and challenging can’t be reduced to a list of components or step-by-step instructions. This is where game-design techniques come in. How do you decide which game elements to put where to create an overall productive gamified experience? Just like strategic leadership, managing a team, or creating a killer marketing campaign, game design is a strong mix of knowledge, skill, and luck.Non-game Context: The final aspect of our definition is that gamification operates in non-game contexts such as on-boarding, marketing, training, client engagement, etc. The key element in each is that they involve real-world business goals. Your players are not storming a fortress, they are exploring the website of your new product. They are not collecting gold coins, they are collecting achievements on the way to learning a new skill or process in the workplace.The three major non-game contexts are: internal, external, and behavior change.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

In honor of this week's BIG news - Microsoft acquires FantasySalesTeam, an innovative sales gamification platform, to help organizations increase productivity - I am pulling from the vault, an interview with the CEO of FST, Adam Hollander.

Why Your Sales Incentives Are Failing: How to Successfully Implement Sales GamificationWhen you talk sales incentives - Leader boards? Top scorers? Challenges? these elements have been part of incentive promotions all along.But… most sales contests fail due to poor design and a lack of understanding how to motivate the entire team vs. the traditional top performers.Successful use of gamification is much more than just fancy leaderboards. This week learn how to successfully drive sales improvements by implementing gamification the right way.

About Adam: Adam Hollander is founder and CEO of FantasySalesTeam which helps sales managers run more engaging and higher performing sales contests modeled on fantasy sports. Adam has worked with hundreds of companies to assist them in achieving their sales targets and has held a variety of sales and sales management roles at both small and large public enterprises. Adam holds a BA in Business Management from Babson College. Connect with Adam: (@FST_Games) www.fantasysalesteam.com

About Your Host: A gamification keynote speaker and curriculum designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as the #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica’s niche is gamification used in the corporate environment. Connect with Monica (@monicacornetti) www.monicacornetti.com

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

There is a new generation of workers taking over key positions in your organization and in your meetings.This generation is younger, yes, but they’re also different in ways that will definitely change how business is done — and those differences are driven by one central factor: growing up playing video games.Data from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows 8-10 year olds spend more than an hour a day with video games. The immense amount of time spent with games during a child’s formative years has led them to be literally “hard wired” in a different way than those who came before.The G Generation (Gamer Generation) will soon outnumber their elders in the workplace. Their way of thinking will soon pass the business tipping point and become standard operating procedure.

Sooner or later, those who grew up without video games will have to understand the gamers. That means not only learning what they’re all about, but finding ways to redesign your organization’s on boarding, engagement, loyalty, and training programs.Welcome to gamification.Gamification is an important and powerful new strategy for influencing and motivating people. It takes the elements of your favorite games like Clue and Angry Birds and applies them to everyday life. Simply defined, gamification uses game mechanics and rewards for non-game applications in order to increase engagement, knowledge transfer, and loyalty. You can take the game mechanics that game designers had been using for years such as competition, real-time feedback, and goal-setting, and apply them outside of gaming.

Gamification works to drive behavior because it is based on satisfying fundamental human needs and desires.

Gamification does NOT mean making a computer or a video game, and expecting it to motivate people … it’s about much more than the technology. It means taking the concepts around games and great game design, and using them in an authentic way to drive the behavior you want to get.For example to implement low-tech gamification in your corporate training you can:

Organize a module of training into quests with challenges that individuals or teams must solve

Turn a review of new information into a highly-charged, audience-driven process where teams work to solve scenario-based problems before time runs out

Ask participants to create avatars or identities they will use when participating in activities

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Like me you’ve probably worked for the boss from hell, a bully manager who insults direct reports, belittles their efforts, and blames them for things over which they have no control.The boss from hell will suck the life and soul out of your people and your organization, stealing dignity and purpose, and replacing those ideals with intimidation and fear.A recent poll of 800 managers and employees in 17 industries, revealed that after being bullied by a boss, even employees who do NOT consider themselves disengaged, develop or exhibit behaviors that greatly impact their organizations bottom line:

Monday, August 3, 2015

Research has demonstrated that people learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. Over the years, action-based learning has been proven to appeal to all types of learners, as it accelerates knowledge and skill acquisition, and ensures long-term retention.Action-based learning uses experiential and accelerated learning techniques such as immersive simulations, game attributes, and other interactive activities to help learners develop insights and transferable understanding as they internalize new information.Well-designed games and simulations that focus on strategic business issues are extremely powerful learning tools because they are able to engage and motivate learners well beyond more traditional teaching methods. Gamification adds the mechanics that triggers the actions to fulfill the individual motivations and needs. All of these work together to ensure key learning and business objectives are met.Sententia’s Leadership Development Program is artfully designed so that learners can easily connect the stories, tasks, and insights they experience during the program with their day-today work lives. This unique, trademarked program engages and involves participants and motivates them to learn..Is now a good time to schedule a Sententia World ExplorerEssential Leadership Skills in a Diverse Workforce™ training program for your leadership and management teams?For more information on program content and how it works, you can view our Slideshare presentation or Download our Facts Sheet

Saturday, August 1, 2015

My guest is David Mullich, a video game producer and designer, and our topic is – Gamification and LearningToday David and I will explore gamification from the perspective of an experienced video game designer who uses gamification in the classroom to teach game design to students.

How traditional video game designers view gamification

How to use gamification in the classroom setting

How to teach gamification to others

This is a perspective we’ve not yet explored on Gamification Talk Radio, so let’s play…About David Mullich is a video game producer and designer who has worked at Activision, Disney, 3DO and the Spin Master toy company. He is now is a freelance game consultant as well as Course Director for Game Production at The Los Angeles Film School and co-creator of the Boy Scouts Game Design Merit Badge. As both an advocate and teacher of gamification, David is consistently rated as a top gamification guru on Leaderboarded. You can connect with David at http://www.electricsheep.biz, davidmullich.wordpress.com, and on Twitter @David_Mullich.About Your Host: A gamification keynote speaker and curriculum designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as the #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You. Monica’s niche is gamification used in the corporate environment. Connect with Monica (@monicacornetti) www.monicacornetti.com.